


In The Next Room

by RoseByAnyOtherName17



Series: The Lion, the Wolf and the Dragon [12]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Assassination, Blood, F/M, Face Changing, Original Character(s), Pre-Slash, Serving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 20:42:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12712578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseByAnyOtherName17/pseuds/RoseByAnyOtherName17
Summary: Walder Frey had said things to her before, things that made her feel sick, but he had never touched her.





	In The Next Room

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a busy time guys, I am so sorry for the long wait. But here it is, and I hope you enjoy :)
> 
> title from the song by Neon Trees

Gendry became a stable boy with a soft, dark face that was hardly taller than Arya when she donned the same face she had shown to him just a couple of days before. Arya tied her long hair back with a scarf and blended seamlessly with the other servant girls in the kitchens, despite a rather exotic appearance compared to the rest of them. It wasn’t uncommon for Essosi youth to cross the Narrow Sea to find work for the lords of Westeros in their great big castles that required an endless stream of smallfolk.

 

Nymeria didn’t wait for Arya to tell her she needed to stay within the forest; she stayed amongst the trees, and when Arya looked back, the direwolf had disappeared. It made her heart hurt, but she forced herself to turn back to the task at hand, hoping with everything she had that Nymeria would be there when they came back.

 

Arya quickly figured out that none of the girls wanted to serve Walder Frey himself; as a matter of fact, as the newest of them, the task fell to Arya. She took him his meals and cleaned his chambers and kept her borrowed face impassive when he swept his gaze over her appreciatively and made comments about keeping her in his bed if he didn’t already have a pretty young wife.

 

If she hadn’t been planning his death already, it would have been the resignation in his little wife’s eyes that pushed her. The girl never spoke a word and held herself still when she could, as though that would make her disappear. It wasn’t how she took every step lightly and with care though; it was her eyes. Walder Frey’s pretty young wife looked as though she were dead already. As though her body just hadn’t figured it out yet. It filled Arya with rage. This girl was just her own age, maybe just older, and she was wed to an old man who had no regard for her except to put yet another heir in her belly.

 

But she had to wait for the right moment.

 

It came on the fifth night, when Black Walder reached out and squeezed her breast through her dress. They were alone but for his brother, and it was the work of a moment to whip out her dagger and slit his throat. Before his body hit the ground, she had taken two steps and pushed her dagger through the younger brother’s heart, the one whose name she didn’t bother to learn. They died with twin expressions of shock on their faces.

 

She knew from the other girls that the brothers were supposed to have a private meal with Walder Frey the following afternoon to discuss the issue of Riverrun. She made quick work of carving the face from Black Walder and stowing it away, as well as removing the clothes from his body. She was close to the stables already, having gone to meet with Gendry like they did every night, so she pulled the bodies into the shadows and continued on her way. None of the other boys gave them a second glance when they slipped back out of the stables, too preoccupied with sleep or the handmaidens that came to visit when midnight came and work was done.

 

Gendry hefted the younger brother up with no problem, but they had to lift Black Walder together. It was tricky, getting the bodies out of the servant’s gate and into the river, and it took longer than Arya liked. There was only so long before one of the other girls noticed she was gone, but she still stopped Gendry outside of the stables. “You need to look messy,” she whispered. He raised a questioning eyebrow, because she was untucking his tunic from his woolen pants and reaching up to ruffle his hair, running her fingers through it. It was coarse, completely unlike his _real_ hair, and she pulled her hand away after just a couple of moments, twisting her face up as she did. “I’ll feel better when you look like you again,” she muttered when he asked her what was wrong. He grinned, and she pushed him back because that was unfamiliar too. “ _Go._ ” And he did, but only after reaching out and running his fingers through _her_ stolen hair and pulling at the collar of her dress.

 

“You need to look messy,” he echoed her.

 

She couldn’t quite keep the smile from her face all the way back to the kitchens.

 

**

 

“Such a pretty girl,” Walder Frey said to her when she entered his chamber the next morning to make up his bed. Arya stayed focused on her task, straightening the sheets and pulling the corners tight. A servant boy was helping the old man put on his breeches a few feet away, but stepped back when Walder put his hand on his shoulder and pushed him back. “Where are you from, girl?”

 

“Braavos, My Lord,” she answered, still not looking up.

 

“Did they teach you to look at a highborn when you speak to them there?”

 

“No, My Lord.” A hand rested on her shoulder and turned her around, and wrinkly fingers were tilting her chin up until her eyes met his watery grey ones. “It is disrespectful for a lowborn to look a foreign lord in the eyes.” Truthfully, the servants in Braavos were encouraged to look a highborn in the eyes when they were spoken to, but she suspected that Walder Frey would not know that.

 

“Such a pity,” Walder said, fingers brushing her cheek, and it took all Arya had not to recoil. “Braavosi girls have the most beautiful eyes.” He returned to the servant boy after looking her up and down, and Arya did her work as quickly as she could before bowing her head and all but fleeing the room. One of the girls in the kitchen, Alayne, frowned sympathetically when she saw Arya’s wide eyes, but didn’t stop what she was doing. Arya moved to the back to scrub her hands in the tub of icy water they kept there. She ran a cloth over her face hard enough that her skin tingled, but the horrible feeling of being touched didn’t leave. Frey had commented before, had said things that made her feel sick, but he hadn’t ever touched her.

 

She shook her head and went back to work. She couldn’t think about that right now; Walder Frey was going to die this afternoon, and she needed to get ready.

 

**

 

In the end, it didn’t go how she expected it to go.

 

She donned Black Walder’s face and _felt_ herself changing into him. He wasn’t—hadn’t been—a tall man, but he was bulky and a little fat, and it wasn’t so easy to sink into his skin, to _become_ him, as she had the girl she had stolen. But as unsettled as she was, her body was his, and when she moved and spoke, she knew she could play him seamlessly. And she did, swaggering into the empty hall and sitting next to Walder Frey at the high table, looking out over the room. _Mother and Robb died here._ She could almost see it happening, and she looked at Frey, keeping her face carefully blank.

 

The food was served by Alayne, who had taken pity on Arya after the events of that morning and volunteered. She was silent through the affair, just barely meeting Arya’s eyes, and when she was finished she melted back into the shadows. “Go on, girl,” Walder said to her. “We won’t need you.” It seemed like a kindness, but Arya knew the real reason: Alayne wasn’t very pretty, at least not by the standards of the men here. Walder Frey didn’t want to look at her while he ate, not the way he enjoyed looking at Arya’s stolen face and body. Right now, it was a blessing in disguise. They were alone.

 

“What is it you wanted to speak of, Father?” she asked, taking a bite of the mutton pie in front of her. She would miss this, she thought, the food. The cook was wonderful.

 

“Your men lost Riverrun to the Stark girl and her Wildlings,” Walder Frey said, glaring at the pie. “After laying it to siege and having Jaime fucking Lannister be the one to defeat the Blackfish, and you lose it in one night to an army half the size of your own. You shamed my house. It is your responsibility to fix the mess.”

 

Arya swallowed and looked over at him. “What do you mean?”

 

“You will take it back.”

 

“Riverrun?”

 

“Yes, you idiot! I should name your brother heir. At least he understands words on the first try!” Walder stabbed his fork into the pie and chewed aggressively, bits of food going everywhere. Arya looked away in disgust.

 

“She has an army of wolves at her back,” she said, acting the part of a cowardly man. “There is no defeating them. They are hungry for the blood of men, you’ve heard the stories.”

 

“Then you will be eaten by the wolves if you fail.” Walder Frey stood up, shoving away from the table. “You leave at dawn. Get your men together.” He began to walk away, leaving the pie almost untouched and Arya sitting there, wearing Black Walder’s dumbfounded face. But Walder stumbled, and she was up in an instant, grabbing his elbow to steady him.

 

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” she said, finding her voice at last.

 

“You will do just that, or I will name another heir!”

 

She turned Walder by the shoulders until he was looking her in the eyes. He glared at her, furious, but after a long moment he stilled, seeing something in his son’s eyes that must have frightened him. Arya waited, and then lifted her hand and pulled Black Walder’s face off, tossing it carelessly to the floor. She shoved Walder Frey into his throne-like chair, relishing in the terror she could see written across his face. “Do you know who I am?” she inquired, as lightly as though she were asking about the frosty weather outside. He opened his mouth, perhaps to call for help, and she smacked a hand across it. “I asked you a question.”

 

“What did you do to my son?” were the words he said when she released him. They surprised her; he had the biggest family in all of Westeros, so why did one man matter? He did not seem like the type to love his children.

 

“Exactly what I’m about to do to you,” she told him, putting her hand back over his mouth. He struggled a little, but it was easy to slip around to his back and force him to stay in the chair with one hand. “Tell me, did you ever feel remorse for killing my mother?”

 

“I’ve had many mothers killed,” he snarled.

 

“But none were quite like Catelyn Stark, were they?” she said softly. “A woman you knew from her childhood, and yet you slit her throat and made her watch her son die.”

 

The little color left in Walder Frey’s face drained away. “You—”

 

“I was there that night,” Arya murmured, withdrawing a knife from the folds of her tunic and bringing it to his cheek. “I watched your men mount my brother’s direwolf’s head onto his body. I would have killed you that night if I could. I would have died as long as I could watch the light leave your eyes. And now I will.” She ran the tip of the blade down his leathery, colorless skin to his throat. “Goodbye, Lord Frey. The God of Death is here for you.”

 

Walder Frey opened his mouth and promptly choked on his own blood as Arya sliced his neck open. He looked up at her while he died, head resting against her breast, eyes wide with shock. In a few short seconds, they went unfocused, and his body went limp.

 

And Arya felt nothing.

 

**

 

A single drop of poison in each man’s cup in the hall that night: that was all it took for them to be dead in their beds by morning, faces stained with the blood they had coughed up.

 

“Go home to your family,” Arya told Walder Frey’s little wife, lying next to her in Walder Frey’s bed. She removed his face and the girl cried out in fear, but Arya only stood and walked away. “You’re free from him now.”

 

**

 

“I don’t feel any different,” she admitted, days later on the way back to Riverrun. Nymeria lay between her and Gendry once more, having emerged from the forest the moment they were out of sight of the Twins. “I’ve destroyed an entire great house. I killed them all, and I feel nothing.”

 

Gendry was the one to move now, to carefully crowd up against her from behind and wrap his arms around her. She turned over until they were face to face, watching his face. He didn’t say anything, but instead moved forward until she thought he might kiss her. She drew in a sharp breath, but he only pressed their foreheads together and looked her in the eyes. For some reason, it was the warmth she found in his face that lulled her to sleep, and kept her asleep until the dawn light crept over the sky.


End file.
